International News & Opinions

China’s Polar Silk Road Offers the West a Chance to Escape Post-Industrial Rot

By Jonathon Ludwig

China, as a responsible major country, is ready to cooperate with all relevant parties to seize the historic opportunity in the development of the Arctic, to addresses the challenges brought by the changes in the region” –Chinese White Paper January 25, 2018.

China’s January 25th unveiling of the “Polar Silk Road” has created a wonderful opportunity for Northern development not seen for decades. This opportunity not only extends China’s incredibly successful growth model to North America, through a revolutionized system of arctic shipping, and infrastructure development, but also provides for a new spirit of diplomacy founded not upon militarization of the Arctic as desired by neo-con utopian throwbacks of the Cheney and Obama eras, but rather cooperation, respect, development and trust.

With Global Affairs Canada responding favorably to the Polar Silk Road initiative and with the Canadian government’s membership in the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, not to mention British Columbia’s Memorandum of Understanding uniting BC with the Belt and Road initiative, this new reality demands serious thinking for Canadians and Americans alike if we are to properly respond in the most genuine and beneficial way for the sake of our people and humanity at large.

From Whence Springs our Crisis?

North America’s stagnant economies have suffered for nearly 50 years under a false set of poisons known dualistically as “post-industrial-consumer society” on the one hand and an “anti-industrial growth economy” on the other. Not since the days of John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt (and their Canadian counterparts John Diefenbaker, C.D. Howe and W.A.C. Bennett) have long term projects driven our economic thinking with the effect of increasing both the productive powers of labor, and improving the moral, physical and intellectual welfare of our citizens. The increase of these three parameters (physical, intellectual, moral) increased our population carrying capacity in ways that no other species is capable, allowing us to nearly triple our population since 1950, and in so doing, demonstrate the true nature of mankind as a species of boundless creative reason to the horror of the British Empire and its indoctrinated managerial elite globally.

Those humanist leaders mentioned above came from an era that didn’t dichotomize “economics” and “politics” as both were recognized as two sides of the same coin which was wonderfully expressed by Benjamin Franklin who described political-economy as the “Science of human happiness”. As soon as that dichotomy was imposed onto western society- formalized by the 1971 destruction of the Bretton Woods Fixed exchange rate system, politics became nothing but a game of sophistry, corruption and hypocrisy, while “economy”, now unbounded by the “moral constraints” of national regulations, became simply a cover for post war imperialism via debt slavery, cheap labor, frenzied speculation, and resource looting. This dichotomized world had no place for such leaders as those listed above- neither in North America nor any other part of the world. Intelligence agencies, now under the full control of the Anglo American financier oligarchy ensured that no nationalist, pro-industrial leader would long be tolerated in office in any country globally.

During the pathological Cold War years, the world was divided among the “developed” who were not supposedly in need of growing any further, and the “undeveloped” who were permitted money and “appropriate technologies” such as windmills, but no real scientific or technological progress that increased the standards of living or productive powers of labor of society. Any form of scientific innovation was relegated to the function of military affairs, or to advance the new “mental pacification industries” (ie: entertainment, pharmacological and recreational drugs, etc). Infrastructure was no longer permitted to be the domain where technology was expressed, nor “development” defined. In fact, during the 1978-2000 interval, new investment in Canadian infrastructure dropped to 0.1%/year (compared to 4.8%/year average prevalent from 1955-1978). Similar trends struck the USA resulting in future havoc now unfolding across North America. Meanwhile productive industries were outsourced to cheap labor markets resulting in a society increasingly addicted to “cheap goods” and decadent services.

The linear logic of animal population boundaries known as “carrying capacity” was thereby imposed upon mankind by the same neo-Malthusian elite who hated mankind so much that they were willing to kill our brightest leaders and engineer a philosophy of cynicism just to convince society, in a vicious form of Pygmalion effect, that our nature was wired to destroy nature and ultimately self destruct. A leading Malthusian architect of this “new society” was Club of Rome co-founder Sir Alexander King, who infamously revealed this intention in the surprisingly candid 1991 book The First Global Revolution:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

And so it went that a generation of doped up baby boomers were induced to “free themselves from the past and future alike” by following the mantras of such gurus as Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley to “turn on, tune in and drop out”. Since humanity is too hopelessly corrupt, they were told to let go of all responsibility to change a world which cannot ultimately be changed and instead go inward in the search for pleasure (pleasure/pain thus becoming validated as a new standard for right/wrong).

This turning away from the future and past rendered an entire generation hopelessly malleable and susceptible to a new ethic called variously “post-structuralism”, “post-realism” and “post-industrialism”. To be more to the point, such names adopted by the counter-culture movement were better labelled “post-truth”.

Now nearly 50 years into this neurotic mess, and facing the immanent meltdown of the illusory speculative debt bubble that too many idiotic economists believe is our “economy”, we have been presented with a potentially wonderful crisis.

A Return to a Humanist Future

China respects the right of all nations to seek their own path. We will never pursue development at the cost of others. We will find a convergence with other countries and will strengthen cooperation with other developing countries and promote cooperation through the Belt and Road Initiative,”

–Xi Jinping, October 22, 2017

What has made this crisis “potentially” wonderful is that a new, viable order has arisen in extraordinarily quick speed since something new began to happen in 2013. This new order is one which respects the right to sovereignty of every nation, and which assumes that international relations should be based upon mutual development of the mental and physical resources of each nation. This is not the New World Order that the Huxley brothers promoted, but one which is founded upon the revival of the just world that Franklin Roosevelt envisioned in opposition to Churchill at the end of World War Two[7] and that John Kennedy described in his call for replacing the Cold War with a commitment for all mankind to explore the stars together.

In the past 30 years, China’s growth model has lifted over 800 million people out of poverty and with the May 2013 announcement of the New Silk Road, China has tied it’s destiny to such new and powerful institutions as the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Eurasian Economic Union inviting all nations of the world to join in the dream. Aware that the monetarist framework of such Bretton Woods-era institutions as the IMF, World Bank and WTO would never permit the type of long term investment into the extended New Silk Road, China has led in the creation of a series of new international financial mechanisms such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, The New Development Bank, New Silk Road Fund, and more.

With this new pace of progress, former colonial countries of the “2nd and 3rd worlds” have become encouraged to challenge the over bloated Gods of Olympus sitting atop the crumbling towers of the City of London and Wall Street. Increasingly even countries of the “1st world” sick of stagnancy and despair have begun to throw their lots in with the New Silk Road. On this note, Donald Trump’s successful state visit to China in November 2017 solidified not only over $250 billion in deals between the two powers and opened the door for vastly enhanced Chinese investment into America, but made a giant leap towards uniting American interests with Eurasia.

Thus far, the New Silk Road has extended development corridors from China to Europe, increasing trade and cultural exchange while unleashing vast potential along the way. New modern cities have been built up from scratch in the hundreds, and new industries, technologies and associated scientific discoveries have blossomed. These corridors have sprung up across the Middle East, Africa, Eurasia and even South America and the Caribbean with poverty alleviation, conflict reduction and hope as the effects.

The Bering Strait as the Lynch pin for the Polar Silk Road

It is conservatively estimated that 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 13% of undiscovered oil reserves are in the Arctic. Minerals stretching all across the periodic table are bountifully found in the Arctic but are of no use for humanity to the degree that no transport grids have been built to reach them.

Currently, China’s projects with its Arctic neighbors involve primarily shipping, tourism, and raw materials. However, the Silk Road spirit is based on full spectrum growth of all components of national economies and has been led by the creation of development corridors everywhere it has been applied (energy, fiber optics, water, community building, health, education and transport infrastructure), and there is no reason to believe that the Arctic shall be an exception to this philosophy.

Since Russia’s Siberian development program parallels the philosophy of the New Silk Road with billions being invested by international players into the Russian far east stretching up to the Bering Strait connection, the century old project of the Bering Strait rail tunnel must be revisited as an ideal point of collaboration to bring next generation technologies and practices back on line for the reconstruction of our physical, mental and moral economic health.

The linking of the 100 km gap between Russian and American continents has been endorsed by Vladimir Putin since 2007, followed by China’s endorsement beginning openly in May 2014. Now, with over 25 000 km of high speed rail built in China alone (38,000 km to be built by 2025), with several additional magnetic levitation rail projects now under construction and vast rail projects extending into the Russian arctic, the next logical step for Eurasian development is to bring America as a whole into this program with rail lines through the Bering Strait. With such a commitment in place, the construction of the long overdue 1000 km rail gap known as the Alaska-Canada rail line will easily be accomplished, with new rail networks built up through the Canadian territories and down through the continent unlocking raw materials, building new advanced cities and uplifting peoples’ living standards along the way.

The Re-awakening of a Once Great People

The necessity to revisit such bold programs as the Mid-Canada Development Corridor, designed by Canadian World War Two hero Gen. Richard Rohmer can finally occur in a lawful fashion once this paradigm is permitted to spread organically to the Arctic. Rohmer’s 1969 plan which foresaw a 4000 km rail track stretching from Nova Scotia to the Yukon, through the “mid Canada” Canadian Shield was designed to open up the underdeveloped zone between the Tundra and the thin zone of development hugging the American border. Had this program been undertaken when it was last presented to the world in 1969 as an alternative to the post-industrial hell that was chosen in its stead, not only would Canada’s population be at least double its current size, but loss of manufacturing jobs (and inversely our addiction to cheap goods from poor nations), the decay in our infrastructure and the dumbing down of our citizens would NOT have occurred.

From this vantage point the creation of Arctic cities inspired by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s Frobisher Bay domed city will quickly become pearls along the great Belt and Road of the North. Such complexes, providing over 5000 engineers and their families with all the comforts of the city of Toronto, were ready to be constructed as early as 1958 were it not for a coordinated attack upon Diefenbaker and the North American economy more generally.

What’s more important than raw material development are the new scientific opportunities to explore the effects of cosmic radiation and its undiscovered role in driving climate cycles, biospheric evolution, and even certain forms of viral diseases. Such investigations can only occur in the cosmic radiation-saturated environments that the Arctic provides. Space exploration, which both Russia and China are increasingly world leaders, also necessitates Arctic environments that mimic extra-terrestrial climate conditions as we will encounter on Mars.

The most important thing is that China wants to have this future and knows that we in the west can be awoken from our long slumber.

China’s Long Term Vision for Humanity

The Belt and Road initiative is a new type of cooperation mechanism. China will follow the principles of openness, cooperation, harmony, inclusiveness, mutual benefit and win-win cooperation. The development programs under the initiative framework are not exclusive but are open to all interested countries or parties, be it from regions along the route or from other parts of the world… Some Canadian friends said to me that as Canada and China are Pacific neighbors, the Belt and Road initiative means a lot of opportunities for Canada as well. In view of the progress that has been made in China-Canada cooperation in all fields over the years, Canada can build on its advantages in resources and technology to strengthen cooperation with Asian countries in such areas as infrastructure development, industrial investment, energy resources, financing, people-to-people exchanges and advanced manufacturing… In the meantime, China and Canada could jointly explore ways and means to extend the Belt and Road to North America [italics by author].”

For the geopolitical thinker, or any other victim of the baby boomer social engineering, such intentions expressed by China are entirely non-existent. All that exists are supposed mechanisms of planning based upon Hobbesian ideas of power of the stronger to dominate the weaker and power to monopolize resources. The notion of power as located in mankind’s ability to coexist and cooperate in the interests of both humanity and the universe as the idea was understood by such thinkers as Gottfried Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt et al., is all but totally lacking in the minds of a society conditioned to think in materialistic terms of reference.

However, any clear minded thinker with a grasp of history, and a loving sense of the future can readily identify the intention of China and its key Eurasian allies. For those who do have eyes unclouded by the effects of social engineering described above, such as Schiller Institute Chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the New Silk Road doesn’t only represent an opportunity to build infrastructure, and heal the wounds of the past half decade, but even more so, it represents nothing less than an opportunity to finally put humanity into harmony with the natural laws of the universe whose primary command is “be creative or collapse”. In a recent conference in Berlin, Mrs. LaRouche ended with the following words.

It is very good to live at this moment in history and contribute to make the world a better place. And it can be done, because the New Paradigm corresponds to the lawfulness of the physical universe in science, Classical art, and these principles. Neo-liberalism and the left-liberalism are as outdated and will disappear like the scholastics debating how many angels can sit on the top of a pin. What will be asserted is the identity of the human species as the creative species in the universe.”